For the past three years this post has been stuck in the drafts folder of my computer.

luiy's insight:

Early adopters rule Twitter. If Twitter wants to survive it will need to make the fight for power that rages inside the platform more fair for all.

How To Make Twitter More Fair and Competitive

The story of my experience on Twitter is the story that is celebrated—but rarely the case for most people. When I joined Twitter in 2009 it was like showing up to a half-settled frontier town. I could talk with people who would normally never talk to me, I could gain a following in fields where I was years younger than most, and I could do this all from a laptop in my underwear.

Twitter was magical in 2009 because the platform was getting a daily flood of users of all stripes eager to find accounts to follow. We’ll never be able to get back to that era of Twitter, but there are a ton of things Twitter can do to help users....

A crowd-funded project from Stanford aims to use graph technologies to better understand international justice. Like Linkurious, you can support this research project and help scientists. You can help apply graph analytics to shed light on the way justice works The justice system is not the most transparent and data friendly domain. Quite the contrary. …

luiy's insight:

You can help apply graph analytics to shed light on the way justice works

The justice system is not the most transparent and data friendly domain. Quite the contrary. That’s why it’s so exciting to see that researchers like Sergio Puig from Stanford and Enric Torrents from MIT are trying to bring data analysis techniques to legal studies. Can social network analysis and graphs help improve justice systems?

It's economically feasible too. The average access speed in the U.S. is now under 10 megabits per second and costs around $40-$60. Verizon FiOS charges $300 a month for 500 megabit service. Yet Google and others charge just $70 a month for a full gigabit connection, download and upload. VTel in Springfield, Vt., charges $35. Gigabit in Hong Kong was $26 way back in 2011.

The iDating industry cares about interactions and connections. Those two concepts are closely linked. If someone has a connection to another person, through a shared…

luiy's insight:

Dating sites and apps worldwide have begun to use graph databases to achieve competitive gain. Neo4j provides thousand-fold performance improvements and massive agility benefits over relational databases, enabling new levels of performance and insight. Join us for a webinar, presented by Amanda Laucher, that discusses the five graphs of love, and how companies like eHarmony, Hinge and AreYouInterested.com, are now using graph algorithms to create more interactions and connections.

Fears that the 'Fragile Five' will provoke a new global financial crisis are overblown. The cycle of economic instability is driven by the political economy of the US, not peripheral countries.

luiy's insight:

We should think of the global financial system as a network of financial relationships, in which some countries are heavily connected to everyone else, while others are only weakly connected. For example, if you look at cross-border portfolio assets, there are enormous differences between the center and the periphery. As the figure above (based on IMF cross-border portfolio investment data for the end of 2012) illustrates, the U.S. is right at the center of the network, attracting investment in large amounts from almost every country in the system. Most countries, including the Fragile Five, sit on the periphery, attracting limited investment from a very small number of countries. The UK occupies an intermediate position in the network—not quite as central as the U.S., but certainly not peripheral either. Large EU countries are in turn less central than the UK, but less peripheral than the remaining countries. Though America’s centrality in the global financial system is widely understood, people have thought little about how this structure affects the system as a whole.

The project sought to borrow the concept of "stigmergy" from the natural world, in which behaviour is co-ordinated from information left in the environment. Termites take material to a location, at which they attempt to deposit it. If the location is already filled, they are trained to add their cargo to the next available space. The researchers developed an algorithm which generates a series of low-level rules for the robots to follow.

"We're not going to Mars anytime soon, but a more medium-term application might be to use similar robots in flood zones to build levees out of sandbags," said lead author Dr Justin Werfel, who was summarising the team's research at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Computer scientists have used the pattern of social media communication in Syria to reveal the structure of opposing forces in the civil war.

luiy's insight:

These guys studied over 600 Twitter and YouTube accounts that post or link to content related to the Syrian conflict. Since many of these accounts point to each other or similar content, they form communities amongst themselves. So O’Callaghan and co used a standard community detection algorithm to tease apart how the accounts were aligned.

The results reveal 16 separate communities which together form four clearly aligned groups. The first are Jihadist, made up of three communities and including accounts associated with Al-Qa’ida.

The second are Kurdish, consisting of a community of political parties and another of youth organisations.

The third is Pro-Assad and consists of essentially one community of supporters of the current Syrian regime.

The final group is made up of ten communities who are characterised as secular or moderate opposition. This includes accounts that support the Free Syrian Army and the Syrian National Coalition.

O’Callaghan and co go on to analyse a representative community from each group. For example, one community supporting the Free Syrian Army consists of 105 social media accounts including one with 73,000 followers that supplies photographs of unidentified bodies so that people can help identify them.

Since 2010, digital direct action, including leaks, hacking and mass protest, has become a regular feature of political life on the Internet. This paper considers the source, strengths and weakness of this activity through an in-depth analysis of Anonymous, the protest ensemble that has been adept at magnifying issues, boosting existing — usually oppositional — movements and converting amorphous discontent into a tangible form.

luiy's insight:

This paper, the third in the Internet Governance Paper Series, examines the intersecting elements that contribute to Anonymous’ contemporary geopolitical power: its ability to land media attention, its bold and recognizable aesthetics, its participatory openness, the misinformation that surrounds it and, in particular, its unpredictability.

Subscribe on YouTube: http://bit.ly/U8Ys7n A short documentary about a Chinese boot-camp-style treatment center for young men "addicted" to the Internet. Rea...

luiy's insight:

In this Op-Doc video, we show the inner workings of a rehabilitation center where Chinese teenagers are “deprogrammed.” The Internet Addiction Treatment Center, in Daxing, a suburb of Beijing, was established in 2004. It was one of the first of its kind – and there are now hundreds of treatment programs throughout China and South Korea. (The first inpatient Internet addiction program in the United States recently opened in Pennsylvania.)

This free plugin for gephi traverses the active graph searching for closed walks, cycles and cliques. It can be used on both directed and undirected graphs.

luiy's insight:

This Gephi plugin traverses the active graph searching for closed walks, cycles and cliques. The search is made using the popular depth-first order search algorithm, using a standard single stack implementation made popular by Robert Sedgewick. Although this is very common in graph searching, there wasn’t a plugin for Gephi performing just this simple task and no more in a efficient way. Some features:

The plugin can be used on both directed and undirected graphs. In the first case, close walks (cycles) are hunted, while cliques in the latter; Reports include a distribution of the founded cycles by size; No use of external libraries: just 18k for the whole package; Asynchronous and interruptible task; Written in a pure OOP flavour, using Gephi APIs.

"Often the object of a desire, when desire is transformed into hope, becomes more real than reality itself."

Celebrated Italian novelist,

luiy's insight:

The possible world of narrative is the only universe in which we can be absolutely certain about something, and it gives us a very strong sense of truth. The credulous believe that El Dorado and Lemuria exist or existed somewhere or other, and skeptics are convinced that they never existed, but we all know that it is undeniably certain that Superman is Clark Kent and that Dr. Watson was never Nero Wolfe’s right-hand man, while it is equally certain that Anna Karenina died under a train and that she never married Prince Charming.

According to Davor Sutija, chief executive officer at Thinfilm, about a trillion sensors are required to power the billion connected devices expected to power the Internet of Things. To meet demand for the sensors, the Norway-based maker of organic semiconductors and printed electronics has developed an alternate approach to the Internet of Things.

At the heart of Thinfilm’s approach is a tweak to the existing definition of the Internet of Things. This definition, propagated by large corporations such as Cisco and IBM, puts a network at the heart of the technology. It consists of an ecosystem of connected devices with sensors and intelligence built into physical objects. These devices will talk to and monitor each other, regardless of distance or power consumption. “If the Internet of Things is just a massive machine talking to itself, then a billion or so microcontrollers (or computers embedded within consumer devices) is fine,” explains Sutija.

The byproduct of use is a Conucopia of the Commons -- the act of using the database adds value to it. As users engage in low threshold participation (read, favorite, tag and link) we gain a form of collective intelligence. But it is important to distinguish the value of collective intelligence and collaborative intelligence, as first pointed out by Mitch Kapor:

...Tons of interesting types of collaborative filtering, like Digg, is TiVo like, indicating individual preferences, with some algorythm logic. Valid and interesting, but people are not connecting. Different from a bunch of people focusing on creating something. That is higher value than collaborative filtering, my thesis, if you can get people to work together. Look at health information, broadly speaking, why are doctors not collaborating to build such a resource -- the lack of information, locked up in a database that Harvard publishes, kills people. I can feel the opportunity...

When users participate in high enagement activities, connecting with one another, a different kind of value is being created. But my core point isn't just the difference between these forms of group intelligence -- but actually how the co-exist in the best communities.

« It only takes one mutant cell to change the course of human evolution. And every time one internet user shares a good idea, it may exponentially reach the minds of two, four, or perhaps a million people who come across it on their non-linear path.

It is often said that humans are reluctant to change, yet in less than 20,000 years we have left our mark on every inch of the planet and beyond.

We owe the rapid rise of human civilization (and our ability to screw in a light bulb) to a simple evolutionary modification of our digital extremities known as the opposable thumb.

Now we have the mouse, which at this very moment puts you just one click away from playing a role in the future of everything. »

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